The metrics make reporting to higher ups easier, no doubt. But the situation you describe is a classic sign of a shit manager: one who cannot justify their decisions except via reference to made up metrics.
If you have four L4 engineers on the team, all of whom are performing at the level described in the career profile as L5, but only budget to promote two of them, how do you pick which two? What if they have different managers, all of whom sincerely believe their report is the one delivering essential value?
If you have an organization with forced bucketing where X% of your team need to be given a subpar rating, how do you decide which one? If you don't have an obvious low performer you'd better have metrics.
This system is soul crushing but it exists all over the industry.
Easy. You quit, and find a better job.
That practice is so toxic that it's sufficient to condemn the organisation as unworthy of any buy-in whatsoever. Just leave.
This ultimately rots an organization from the inside, as it leads to attrition of higher performers because they're forced to work with useless people.
You see this a lot in companies that rarely fire people, because managers optimize for accumulating direct report count (whether or not those direct reports are doing valuable work).
but the answer can't be an army of useless middle managers diluting the impact of the people who actually do want to help the company and providing cover for people like them that are just phoning it it.
As well as regularly rotating managers, like the military does (e.g. 3 year reassignment).
Hum... So instead you decide to immediately rot the organization from the inside.
I can see how it avoids that one problem. The important problem is the waiting, right?
You (=hypothetical manager, please excuse second-person tense) use your managerial skills to make a decision, which considers metrics and other contributing factors. Then you write a justification which you defend, to higher ups and to those who weren't promoted. Because that's your job.
It's a lot easier than applying back pressure, fighting for your reports, or quitting in solidarity.
"Sorry, Hugo and Maryna, you two only got the Fields medal while Anton and Alain got a Nobel Prize, so we'll have to let you go for your under-performance."
* Corporate says "here are the buckets. They should match at the VP level since that's a large pile of people"
* VPs tell their Directors to match these buckets, who recurse further
* L1/2 Manager Alice says "my team is too small, this isn't how statistics work, I want an exception"
* Problem #1: the teams with actual low performers will often make similar claims
* Alice is now a troublemaker in VP/Director's eyes
* If Alice and everyone who feels the same way quits in protest, nothing changes except that the org is full of yes men, none of whom are even trying to push for changes in the system any more.
The fact that they can't control this one thing does not mean that they should just abandon the whole company. If Alice finds a company where they can get similar compensation for similar workload without the forced bucketing, perhaps that's a good idea for their mental health, but Alice leaving is a large negative for the team.
'advocating for them' and 'pushing for changes' are parts of the first two.
When back pressure and fighting for your reports does not work, what do you do then?
As you wrote it, Alice leaving is a large negative for the company to, making it full of yes men, unable to change away from a collision course.
Continue fighting the battles you can win. Do your job and do it well. Changing jobs is hard, stressful, unavailable to many people for a variety of reasons, and not guaranteed to improve things. Particularly once you start becoming senior and in management.
If I left a job every time I was faced with a bad situation I would never built up the soft skills or connections to be any good at any connection. Particularly as a first-level manager, where 80% of your job is delivering messages you had no say in but have to own anyway.
My response was meant to be interpreted as doing something other than appeasement, which includes "fighting the battles you can win."
But changing jobs doesn't happen immediately, and "somewhere better" may be very hard to find.
What happens next is this manager gets a low performance rating themselves, for making decisions not backed by metrics. So next year they conform.
The upper managers do that because they think the lower ones are lying or incompetent. A traceable process doesn't lie.
And yeah, it's stupid, and it makes the problem worse. It's the reason nonetheless.
While that's true, it's also a difficult problem to solve. In tiny organizations like startups where the CEO personally knows everyone and what they do, it's easy.
But as soon as you grow beyond that (and I've been in a number of startups that cross that gap), how do you objectively but fairly handle this? There is no easy answer.
You could go with fully empowering all managers to do as they wish. Trust them to hire, fire and promote correctly. This is great, until you hire some bad managers. And as you grow, it is 100% guaranteed at some point you'll hire bad managers. So then they ruin it for everyone, hiring and promoting their buddies.
And that's how you end up with more objective metrics. Take away some of that freedom, make everyone measure and justify actions based on metrics. It's terrible, but probably better than the alternative.
This is a case where you're forced to rate people who are up to par as subpar - the rating system is simply bullshit. You should be allowed to rate people according to their actual performance.
Metrics don't solve the underlying problem which is that the rating system sucks. Having a random number generator called "metrics" to "make decisions" isn't good either.
I think it's Joel Spolsky who has a tale of a manager asking him to do that for his team when everyone had gone all in with overtime to get something shipped on time. To their great credit, the author refused, and the manager saw sense.
If you’re a manager in this type of system, your job is to reach out constantly and find folks who are low performers and get them into your department. They will fill the bottom of your team rating chart. At that point, they can be managed out (ideally in a humane way) or just held onto to fill that cellar dweller role while not slowing others down (some people are ok with this as long as they get paid).
I would never choose to work in an environment like that, but some people find themselves there without better options (e.g., being location-bound due to family, etc.).
It used to be tongue in cheek, but maybe the industry actually needs something like this.
Have you heard any story by someone that was hired into some megacorp just to be sent into a PIP or fired by low performance before they had any chance to even do anything? Stack ranking is the most common reason those happen.
Think something like "Tool $X is missing on machine $Y. Please can you install it, according to $POLICY it is meant to be on all prod machines." Then the ticket gets closed with "The policy is correct. $X must be on all prod machines, we cannot change this." Without installing the tool.
Then when the annual anonymous "rate your satisfaction with these services" survey came round, they wondered why the ratings were so bad - I made sure in the open text feedback not to go after the poor employee but to raise concerns about the performance of the team manager. I won't take credit for it, but I'm told things at $COMPANY have got better since.
This isn't about a singular individual, it's about a group of professionals. You have to deploy systems thinking. If you give a cohort a tool that allows and incentives them to do worse at their job, the average person in that group will perform worse.
I like my boss; I have also built a skillset and frugalness where I don't worry about working for someone I don't respect ever again. But I still care about what's going on at large and trends. I don't want downward pressure on the average. Not only will that slowly seep into effecting me, I also care about the lives of the people at points in their career where they don't have employment opportunities that allow them to avoid bad management.
Well then it means the vast, vast, vast majority of companies with a coherent corporate structure are shit. Welcome to reality
It's not about being "easy". It's about being objective, verifiable, and demonstratably unbiased. It's about justifying how you rank the performance in a way that's impossible to refute.
> But the situation you describe is a classic sign of a shit manager:
It's not, and frankly this "shit manager" accusation is an infantile remark that screams a failure to understand what it means to perform well.